David Lamkins picked up his first guitar a long time ago. As best he can recall the year was 1967: the year of the Summer of Love. Four decades later David has conjured up an amalgam of folk, rock and jazz solo guitar music for the occasional intimate Portland audience.

My technical background

I learned electronics hands-on at a very young age. I literally started when I about four years old. While other kids were reading comics, I read things like the ARRL Handbook and the RCA Receiving Tube Manual. I built a lot of gear as a hobbyist - mostly audio and later digital. Never did get the hang of RF, but learned a lot about layout in the process. I spent a couple summers in high school as a bench technician, repairing TVs, stereos, tape recorders, etc. Mostly tube gear at that time, although transistors were starting to make inroads.

I thought I wanted to be a computer designer, but Intel released the 4004 right after my first year of college. I saw the handwriting on the wall: there weren't going to be any more Seymour Crays in that field. So I focussed on Computer Science and took a bunch of EE courses. Through a special program I was able to replace most of my liberal arts courses with courses that I really wanted to take, so I was able to get about five years' worth of CS courses and two years of EE courses in the span of four years.

I spent about a year between my first and second half of college doing tech work for a video game manufacturer. I worked as an EE during my last two years of college and for four years afterwards, doing instrumentation, process control and automation using both digital and analog techniques.

After that I decided to actually do something (besides firmware) with my CS degree and got into the early days of video games (Parker Bros. and Activision). The home videogame industry tanked around `83 or `84 and I moved on to doing more traditional software development work. I eventually became interested in AI, and have developed a lot of practical applications in that field. I wrote a book on Lisp, self-published it on the web, and released it in hardcopy this year.

Now I'm working as a software engineer for a growing self-funded company and looking forward to getting into amp building as a retirement career.